In the commercial baking and packaging of cookies and similar items, a common procedure is to deposit dough on a plurality of parallel conveyor tapes, and move the tapes through a baking oven. When the dough emerges from the opposite side of the hot oven, the dough has been cooked so as to form edible cookies. Workers or automated machines then gather a predetermined number of the hot cookies and load them into the semicylindrical cells of cookies trays or other containers, and the loaded cookie trays are then placed in a bag and shipped to the retail market.
Some cookies of uniform size and shape and with relatively smooth exterior surfaces can be loaded by automatic equipment into the cookie trays. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,290,859, 3,500,984, 3,538,992, 3,927,508, 4,098,392, 4,413,462, 4,221,287, 4,394,899 and 4,413,462 all disclose various automated machines for loading articles into containers.
The prior art devices utilized for automatically loading cookies and the like into trays do not function very well when the cookies are of irregular, nonuniform shape, and of various sizes. For example, the relatively new commercially mass produced home style cookie which is baked with a substantially flat bottom surface but with an irregular top surface is more difficult to load into a package than cookies which are smooth on both top and bottom surfaces. An example of home style cookies is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,455,333, and the cookies might include nuts or chocholate chips or other items that forms lumps in the top surfaces of the cookies.
The prior art cookie loading equipment generally functions to gather and stack the cookies in bundles or groups at various stages prior to loading the cookies in the cell of the cookie tray that becomes part of the package, and if the home style cookie is being handled in this manner by the prior art equipment the irregular top surfaces of the cookies tend to occasionally cause the equipment to malfunction, or some of the cookies might become damaged as they are being loaded into a tray.
Typically, the prior art devices accumulate a large number of cookies in a stacked relationship, and then a predetermined number of the cookies at the leading end of the stack are separated from the other cookies by a shearing movement of the compressed stack. While this can be accomplished with cookies having smooth top and bottom surfaces, the more irregularly shaped cookies tend to become damaged because of the compressed shearing action. Further, this type of separation of irregularly shaped cookies might result in the incorrect number of cookies being gathered into a bundle and then placed in the cell of the package.
It is highly desirable to avoid contact between adjacent top and bottom surfaces of adjacent ones of the home style cookies during the packaging process. When contact is made between adjacent ones of the cookies in a cookie tray, it is desirable that only a minimum contact force be experienced between the cookies so as to avoid damaging the irregularly shaped, somewhat fragile top surface of each cookie.
Most of the known prior art loading devices require the cookies or other objects being loaded into a package to be moved in series at equal spacing so that the system can receive each cookie on a preplanned basis, with the components of the machinery operating in timed relationship with the equally spaced, constant velocity movement of the cookies into the equipment. If the cookies are not uniformly spaced as they are received continuously from the baking oven, usually the cookies are either reformed into equally spaced sequence or gathered in abutting relationship, as described above. This makes the loading equipment complex and requires more handling of the cookies.